On Fire: Photographs by Larry Schwarm

This exhibition presents work by
Larry Schwarm, winner of the Center
for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography for
his series of color images capturing the dramatic prairie fires that
sweep across the Flint Hills of Kansas each spring. A professor of art
at Emporia State University, Schwarm has spent the past twelve years
photographing the burning of the tallgrass prairie in his native state.

Schwarm's work was selected from close to 500 entries in the inaugural
competition for the CDS/Honickman First Book Prize, which offers
publication of a book of photographs, a $3,000 grant, and inclusion in
a traveling exhibition. Robert Adams, one of America's preeminent
landscape photographers, was the judge for the 2002 prize.

Images in this exhibition were selected from Schwarm's prize-winning
book, On Fire, published in November 2003 by Duke University
Press and the Center for Documentary Studies.

The prints in this exhibit have been donated to the Rare Book,
Manuscript, and Special Collections Library (RBMSCL), through the
generosity of the Honickman Foundation established by Lynne and Harold
Honickman. Harold Honickman is a member of the Duke University Library
Advisory Board.

This gift of Larry Schwarm's exhibition prints supports RBMSCL's
commitment to acquiring photographic collections that have artistic
merit and that reflect the visionary purposes and documentary impulses
of their creators.

Photography has the remarkable
power to impress into memory a distillation of a particular segment of
time. The desire to hold memories of how a moment looks, smells, and
feels, led me to become a photographer.

Since ancient times, fire has been considered one of the four elements,
along with earth, air, and water. Fire has a connection to our
collective unconscious—it is good and evil, soothing and terrifying,
protective and threatening, a force for destruction and rebirth. Elijah
was taken to heaven in a chariot of fire; Saint Anthony is sometimes
depicted with his feet in flames from stamping out the devil. Fire
heats our houses but can destroy our homes. And grass, too, in its many
forms is fundamental to our being on this planet. Fire and grass—how
could I not be drawn to them?

The North American tallgrass prairie once covered the eastern Great
Plains, stretching from Texas to Canada and covering nearly 152 million
acres. Agricultural and urban development have taken their toll, and
today not even 1 percent of the original tallgrass prairie remains,
with much of that broken into small, isolated parcels. My photographs
are made on the largest remaining stand of the tallgrass prairie, the
Flint Hills in east-central Kansas.

Fire is essential to the prairie ecosystem. Without it, the prairie
would have grown into scrub forest. Before human habitation, unbroken
expanses of grasses as tall as eight-feet high would catch on fire and
burn for hundreds of miles. Native Americans set fires to entice bison
to the new grass that replaced the burned. European settlers adapted
the practice and burned to encourage new growth for their cattle, as
well as to kill invasive trees and weeds. What started as a natural
phenomenon became an annual event controlled by people. The metaphor is
obvious—without destruction there is no rebirth; for every act there is
an opposing one.

— Larry Schwarm, from his afterword to On Fire

Larry Schwarm's photographs of
fire on the prairie are so compelling that I cannot imagine any later
photographer trying to do better. His pictures convince us that
seemingly far away events are close by, relevant to any serious
person's life. The photographer engages our attention first by
heightening our amazement at the sensuality of fire. Most of us have
enjoyed looking into a fireplace, but few of us have observed as well
as he has the astonishing shapes and colors and fluidity of fire. He is
so skilled in recording its appearance that occasionally we almost hear
the burning and feel the warmth.

What do the photographs mean? We recoil from that question in fear that
the pictures might wither to abstraction, but their sensuality saves
them. In any case we all do look for meaning in life and thus in art,
its reflection. How could we not, since the two most evident
characteristics of life, beauty and suffering, seem a contradiction
that undermines meaning, or at least obscures it.

Because Schwarm includes views of beauty at so many different hours of
day and dusk and night, and because he shows us beauty even after
destruction, the pictures suggest to me that beauty lasts forever. As
in the paintings of Frederic Church and the music of Beethoven and the
poetry of Robinson Jeffers, it is the only answer that Nature appears
to give us. It may feel a cruelly abbreviated reply, as cold as
Church's pictures of icebergs, but there is no appeal. Our choice is
ultimately whether to say yes to what cannot be avoided—lying down in
glory with the burning grass and trees.

Though as a landscape photographer, Schwarm does not include people in
his photographs, he does imply in the accompanying text something
important: the fires on the Flint Hills are now usually set and shaped
by people who want, in so far as they understand, to help heal the
earth.